BSRIA and Designing Buildings Wiki are giving you the chance to win £500 of BSRIA membership, training or publications and to be featured in Delta T magazine by suggesting ways that buildings can be made to perform better. Gregor Harvie, co-founder of Designing Buildings Wiki explains why.

The UK government’s commitment to progressively reduce carbon emissions compared to 1990 levels is broadly in line with the COP21 goal agreed in Paris last year for keeping global warming well below 2 degrees centigrade.

But the Climate Change Committee has reported we are not on track to meet the fourth carbon budget, which covers the period 2023-27, and that meeting the 2050 target, a reduction of more than two thirds compared to today’s levels, will “…require existing progress to be supplemented by more challenging measures.”

The construction industry generates or influences 47% of UK carbon emissions, and 80% of those emissions are from buildings in use. So unless the performance of buildings is improved, we will struggle to meet our carbon reduction commitments or the COP21 goal.

The tightening of the building regulations is intended to help deal with this. But figures from Innovate UK’s Building Performance Evaluation Programme have revealed that the carbon emissions of the 76 homes assessed were 2.6 times higher than their building regulations calculations, and emissions of the non-domestic buildings were 3.8 times higher.

And of course the building regulations do little to improve the existing building stock. Its estimated that around two thirds of the housing that will be occupied in 2050 has already been built.

In fact, our actual energy consumption has changed relatively little since the 1970’s, and the reduction in carbon emissions achieved to date has largely been the result of a shift away from coal powered generation. Now that the low hanging fruit have been taken, the task gets harder.

Couple this with a population expected to rise from 65 million now to around 77 million by 2050, and we have a problem.

So what can be done?

BSRIA and Designing Buildings Wiki have launched an ideas competition asking ‘how would you make buildings better’.

The challenge requires outside the box thinking to come up with radical ideas for reducing the emissions of buildings in use. Tell us about those innovations you think of in the middle of the night and the solutions to the world’s problems you only come up with after a few hours in the pub. Whether you think the answer lies in the adoption of smart technology, better regulation, on-site generation, monitoring and feedback, or more drastic measures such as carbon rationing or a contractual requirement for buildings to achieve design standards. The more innovative and far-reaching the idea the better.

The competition is very simple to enter. You don’t need to write a long essay, your idea might only take a paragraph, or even a sentence to explain.

Architect Dr Gregor Harvie is co-founder of Designing Buildings Wiki, a free, cross-discipline knowledge base for the construction industry written by its users. It is home to more than 3,200 articles and is used by more than 10,000 people a day. Designing Buildings Wiki is supported by BSRIA, CIOB ICE, BRE, RSH+P, Buro Happold and U+I Group.

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